In acclaimed works Ain’t I a Woman and All About Love the writer shared her ideas about race, feminism and romance with flair and compassion
bell hooks, a colossus of Black feminist thought, died on December 15 in her home in Berea, Kentucky. Her writings are foundational to contemporary movements for justice and have opened countless doors in radical thought on race, class, gender, and other forms of oppression.
According to her sister, Gwenda Motley, hooks died of renal failure . The author and intellectual was surrounded by friends and family when she passed. She was 69.
hook’s seminal works, such as Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism , have blazed a trail for third-wave feminism and intersectionality. Ain’t I A Woman , which was published 40 years ago this year and inspired by Sojourner Truth’s speech of the same name, discussed the conditions faced by Black women in mainstream feminist movements that ignored them in favor of white supremacy and middle-class politics. hooks redefined feminism to be more expansive and more radical. “Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression,” she wrote in Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center . In Feminist Theory , she criticized liberal groups for promoting definitions of feminism that sought only to make women equal to men – despite the fact that some men, too, experience forms of oppression.
hooks was born in the deeply segregated South in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She chronicled how capitalism and slavery have laid the groundwork for the mistreatment of Black women in society. She wrote, too, of how Black people can assert self-determination in the face of a society seeking to dominate and suppress individualism.
She wrote extensively about love as a collective and individual practice — one that is antithetical to domination, and can propel society and progressive movements toward liberation .
In her 2000 book All About Love: New Visions , hooks wrote ,
It is essential to our struggle for self-determination that we speak of love. For love is the necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact. It is love that allows us to survive whole.
Love must be radically conceived as a means to empower oppressed communities, hooks emphasized. As adrienne maree brown wrote for Truthout , drawing upon hooks’s work, it is impossible to receive that love from a nation that seeks to marginalize its non-white, non-wealthy communities; instead, the left must dispel concepts of love that are transactional or drawn upon oppressive power dynamics.
Many modern feminists and progressive thinkers have championed hooks for laying the groundwork for their own radical work; abolitionist and We Do This ‘Til We Free Us author Mariame Kaba, for instance, has credited hooks for helping to open her mind to the intersections of gender and race. Other writers have similarly said that hooks’s work was crucial to their intellectual development.
“For me, reading ‘Ain’t I A Woman’ was as if someone had opened the door, the windows, and raised the roof in my mind,” wrote journalist and author Min Jin Lee , who took a class taught by hooks at Yale University in 1987 and was inspired to seek out her work even though hooks herself didn’t assign it:
[F]or me, a Korean girl who had been born in a divided nation once led by kings, colonizers, then a succession of presidents who were more or less dictators, and for millenniums, that had enforced rigid class systems with slaves and serfs until the early 20th century, and where women of all classes were deeply oppressed and brutalized, I needed to see that the movement had a space for me.
hooks also regularly engaged in cultural criticism , and in more recent decades critiqued pop culture figures and modern movements for their unidimensional conception of race, gender, and other forms of oppression. She believed that engaging pop culture was important for advancing critical thinking.
As progressive communities honor and grieve hooks , her own words on grief, from All About Love , can be instructive:
To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love. Since loving lets us let go of so much fear, it also guides our grief. When we lose someone we love, we can grieve without shame. Given that commitment is an important aspect of love, we who love know we must sustain ties in life and death. Our mourning, our letting ourselves grieve over the loss of loved ones is an expression of our commitment, a form of communication and communion
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Article from the Guardian:
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, has died aged 69.
Her niece Ebony Motley tweeted : “The family of @bellhooks is sad to announce the passing of our sister, aunt, great aunt and great great aunt.”
She also attached a statement, which said that “the family of Gloria Jean Watkins is deeply saddened at the passing of our beloved sister on December 15, 2021. The family honored her request to transition at home with family and friends by her side.”
The author, professor and activist was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952, and published more than 30 books in her lifetime, covering topics including race, feminism, capitalism and intersectionality.
She adopted her maternal great-grandmother’s name as a pen name, since she so admired her, but used lowercase letters to distinguish herself from her family member. hooks’ first major work, Ain’t I a Woman?, was published in 1981, and became widely recognised as an important feminist text. It was named one of the 20 most influential women’s books in the last 20 years by Publishers Weekly in 1992.
She went on to write Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center in 1984, All About Love: New Visions in 2000 and We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity in 2004, continuing to draw on themes of feminism, race, love and gender.
Since 2004, she taught at Berea College in Kentucky, a liberal arts college that offers free tuition.
In 2016 hooks wrote in the Guardian that Beyoncé’s album Lemonade was “capitalist money-making at its best”, but criticised the notion of “freedom” depicted in the lyrics. “To truly be free,” wrote hooks, “we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy.”
“I want my work to be about healing,” she said in 2018 when she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers’ Hall of Fame. “I am a fortunate writer because every day of my life practically I get a letter, a phone call from someone who tells me how my work has transformed their life.”
hooks’s family stated that “the family is honored that Gloria received numerous awards, honors, and international fame for her works as a poet, author, feminist, professor, cultural critic, and social activist. We are proud to just call her sister, friend, confidant, and influencer.”
“Oh my heart,” writer Roxane Gay tweeted in response to the news. “bell hooks. May she rest in power. Her loss is incalculable.”
Margaret Atwood told the Guardian: “bell hooks embodied amazing courage and deeply felt intelligence. In finding her own words and power, she inspired countless others to do the same. Her dedication to the cause of ending ‘sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression’ was exemplary.”
The author of The Handmaid’s Tale added: “Her impact extended far beyond the United States: many women from all over the world owe her a great debt.”
The British writer Candice Carty-Williams also paid tribute: “bell hooks was a writer whose scope of sensibilities taught me, nourished me, engaged me. But it was her writing on love that changed my life after a friend forced me to read All About Love, a book that I knew would contain so much power and truth that I was afraid of its contents. bell hooks will be missed, but the legacy she leaves behind is monumental and enduring, much like the ideals of love she put to the page.”
Meanwhile Aminatta Forna, the Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer, remembered meeting hooks in the early 90s. “I met bell hooks as a young reporter when I was sent to interview her for the BBC’s Late Show,” she said.
“She took care to put me at my ease, played music, made tea for us and complained about not being able to find anyone to braid her hair where she lived in the Greenwich Village. In the ensuing interview she predicted the so-called ‘culture wars,’ which I guess now, looking back, had already begun in the US. She said that one day the centre would have to shift. And she was right.”
The broadcaster and writer Afua Hirsch commented that “reading bell hooks was an experience of profound relief. She had powerfully identified and articulated, with characteristic intellectual rigour, phenomena which I instinctively perceived but had never seen vocalised.”
She added: “And yet as a young black woman, it was bell’s generosity in sharing her own experience of love, sexuality and gender that provided the conduit for her work to reach me in such a personal and direct way. She exploded the false binary between the personal and the academic through her truth telling, and it continues to inspire me to this day.”
hooks’ family said that contributions and memorials can be made to the Christian County Literacy Council, which promotes reading for children, or the Museums of Historic Hopkinsville Christian County, where a biographical exhibit is on display.
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